Or maybe, 5 online tools a community manager should not live without. These are tools that I’ve grown accustomed to as they’ve grown in popularity and as of today, I can’t successfully do my job without. And, let’s not forget – I’m writing this from my point-of-view as a blogger (hence Google Notebook!). Here are the 5 (nay) 7 tools every community manager can make good use of in three categories – Organize, Communicate and Track.

And, the best part of Google Notebook is that it’s integrated into Google Bookmarks, so this becomes a great way to gather all those little websites that you track through your daily work. Google Notebook really shines when you’re a community blogger. It helps you throw into buckets all those little URLs you gather along the way. I use it to arrange my thoughts both for my personal blog (see picture below) or ideas for LinkedIn’s corporate blog.

Again a data monitoring and aggregation tool. Try searching your “company name” within Technorati or Google blog search. The resulting feed can then be “fed” to your Google Reader where you get the most timely mentions of the brand you’re monitoring.

COMMUNICATE

A key role of the community manager is effective communication both internally (within an organization) and externally (to users). Now, when I started at LinkedIn there was an internal blog I tried blogging about topics that may be of interest. But it was rather cumbersome and I longed for a service that allowed not only me, but also for anybody within an organization to start a privatediscussion on professional topics of common interest with their colleagues.

By far, the best way I’ve found (feel free to share other options, and yes, I do work there as community evangelist) to share news articles that I think my colleagues may be interested in discussing. And, most importantly, it’s private.

4. Blog

Finally, blogs are by far the best way to maintain that all-important conversation with users in a public format. It’s great because its an open conversation that’s timely, relevant, search index optimized, and I could go on. I cannot stress the effectiveness of blogging as a web communication tool for community managers. If there’s a better way, let me know, by leaving a comment.

…and one more thing…

REAL-TIME TRACKING

One of the greatest advancements in being a customer evangelist these days is the ability to respond to user requests sooner vs. later, thanks to the following 3 tools (there may be others) that enable real-time tracking or as close to it as possible.

I’ve mentioned before how easy it is these days to set up an email based tracking mechanism for keywords associated with your “company name” or brand. Google alerts allows you to set this up in 1 easy step. Check it out here. And, read more of my take on it here.

Presenting a real time feed of all the various services you’re addicted to, it takes immediate gratification to the next level. Caution: It could be a time sink, but check out ways to prevent that from happening, below.

How can I use it for community management:

* Search & Track all mentions of your “company name”

* You can do that either (a) directly on Friendfeed, (b) through their desktop app AlertThingy and Twhirl (links below)

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Now, many of you may complain that twitter and friendfeed are distractions. Now if you’re of the easily distracted kind there’s hope for you. Here are two simple ways to keep track of your usage/wastage of time with Twitter/Friendfeed vs. spending time on these sites.

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One of the first questions asked at our recent SXSW panel on corporate blogging was “should my company have a corporate blog?”. Wrong question! Time and again, I’ve repeated, don’t start with a tactic in mind, always start with a strategic goal and then find out what your options are. So, I was rather pleased to read a recent article by Neil Davey, editor of MyCustomer.com, which agreed with this key concept as he outlines simple steps on what companies should consider before entering the corporate blogosphere!

Three questions to ask yourself and your team before you plunge into the world of the corporate blogosphere (after the jump).

Companies’ deadly mission: To crack the forbidden kingdom of the blogosphere!

So, what exactly are the three questions you need to ask yourself before you start a corporate blog. We asked them at LinkedIn and I’d advise any company asking themselves the questions since the decision has to be ratified at all levels and you better have answers before you take this idea to your boss.

1. Why are we starting a corporate blog? What are the goals?

Pretty obvious question to ask, but you’ll be surprised how many companies don’t ask this question before they start a blog. At LinkedIn, we did have a couple of primary goals; we wanted to have a site for (1) user education and (2) customer engagement (feedback). Traditionally, goal #1 would be achieved through a corporate website, but what the blog allowed beyond that is a constantly updated 2-way communication vehicle (which is what baffles me when companies have blogs without comments!). Equally important is the fact that these goals (primary & secondary) should fit into your company’s wider objectives. As Tom Nixon, says in the article:

“It needs to feed down from the wider corporate objectives,” adds Nixon. “Look at what the company’s overall marketing plans are and then find out how you can feed off that. So for example, if the company wants to improve awareness of its brand, then a blog – if it is good – can be picked up by other people who link to it and slowly it spreads the word about your brand.”

Always, start with the goal in mind.

2. Where are my users?

Here’s something else that companies forget. A blog may traditionally be far more utilitarian to a computer software company vs. a brick-and-mortar one (although, I believe that’s changing rapidly as well). But ask yourself, where exactly are my users online. Where do they congregate and how do they find answers to the questions they have?

In our case, most of our users where tech savvy and could be found online, so it made a lot of sense to focus our efforts on a corporate blog as is the case for most web 2.0 startups, I’m sure.

3. What is the internal and external culture?

And, finally, let’s not forget that after all blogs are nothing more than a vehicle that makes more porous the membrane that exists between the individuals who create your products and the individuals who use them. (Thanks to Hugh for the concept). You’ve got to make sure that a blog is not just about that “chief blogger” but more about everyone within the company who can blog. In LinkedIn’s case, almost 18% of our workforce has blogged. That’s nearly 40 of my colleagues, which includes key members of the management team as well.

Next step: So, if based on answers to the above three questions you’ve decided to start a blog, kudos! There’s another post in the making as to what steps to follow once you decide to start a blog. If you can’t wait to read that, check out Neil’s post where he talks about that in brief. (Read post here)

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So, it’s been a year since we started the LinkedIn blog! To commemorate the occasion I actually just posted the Top 10 blog posts, Top 10 videos and Top 10 photos we published this past year. In addition to it being quite an essential tool in helping us educate as well as engage with users, it did teach us a few lessons on best practices on business blogging.

That’s Kay and I. Kay runs corp. communications at LinkedIn.

Given below are 5 tips on business blogging (via Planet Domain Blog) and I used that as a launchpad to outline some of the corporate blogging practices we’ve followed at LinkedIn.

1. Plan ahead and post regularly

So, when you start a blog it’s all about topics you’re passionate about but for a corporate blog, the best way to get some traction is to chart out a calendar schedule asap and adhere to it. When we started the blog we had roughly 3 posts a week and when there were no product releases (maybe 2), but then the frequency has considerably ramped up since then bringing our average posts/week to 4.

Total # of posts: 170

Average posts/week: 4

2. Be original and fresh

One of the best sources of content for a corporate blog (as hard as it may seem) is the cool stuff that’s happening internally in a company that the external world is not privy to. There are two broad streams of content that’ll make any corporate blog unique.

And, for a corporate blog – personalities count. In LinkedIn’s case, thus far 40 personalities (my colleagues) count themselves as contributors to the blog. From the management team to a broad slew of product managers, engineers and designers. Make sure everyone is counted and continue courting different groups within your company to be a part of the blog. The blog is NOT about a single individual, but rather everyone who makes up the company.

Did you know: 18% of our workforce have contributed to the LinkedIn Blog

4. Social media means “social”

To comment or not to. Believe it or not, that was one of the first questions we had to wrestle with, although the answer was an overwhelming “Yes”. But if you’re debating within your organization whether to activate comments for a blog, think about this – it’s NOT a blog if you don’t foster two-way communication. If you don’t allow comments (as many corporate blogs do these days) reduces a blog’s value to being a press release machine! And, don’t forget to make sure that all the feedback provided on your blog is re-routed to the right product/design/engineering teams to enable that infinite feedback loop.

Total # of comments received: 1500

Average comments/post: 9

Maximum comments received for any post: 82

5. Write well, or find someone you can

Well, hire a blogger (like Kay did when she brought me into LinkedIn) or find someone within the company who has the necessary traits (if you don’t, the users will find their blogger as was the case with Scoble when he was at Microsoft). More importantly, I think being a blogger is an essential prerequisite to be a community manager (check out Chris Brogan’s recent post on finding the right community manager).

These are just a few. Feel free to leave a comment on other best practices on corporate blogging.

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Some blog posts don’t need many words rather just a picture may suffice or in this case, just a chart. Nielsen Online’s Top 10 online social networking sites each month always reflects the terrific growth numbers for LinkedIn and March 2008, looks like the team outdid themselves and as community evangelist I’m naturally excited.

LinkedIn was the fastest growing social networking site for March 2008 as measured by unique audience (year over year), and in effect moving from 5th to 4th spot, nudging aside Windows Live Spaces. Given below is the chart.

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One of the perks of a community evangelist role is speaking to different groups of LinkedIn users or professionals in communicating the message of professional networking. (check out one of my favorite panel discussions that I participated in at SXSW earlier this year). Thought I’ll highlight a couple of other interviews I did most recently (one podcast and a blog interview). See below.

1. LexBlog interview w/ Kevin O’Keefe:

I had an email Q&A Session with Rob La Gatta (editorial manager) at Lexblog, “the leading source of information and commentary on the use of blogs, RSS, and social media for the marketing of law firms.” Thought I’ll highlight a few facts that I find most unique about LinkedIn’s foray into corporate blogging that we discussed during the interview (Check out the entire interview here)

* That’s like 18% of the workforce [that] at LinkedIn has already blogged on the LinkedIn blog.

* The blog definitely has a very healthy involvement from the users with an average of 9 comments/post.

* Of course, some product posts receive almost 75 comments, so it widely varies with each post (as is expected).

We also talk about the genesis of the LinkedIn blog (did you know we had an internal discussion on if we should allow comments or not?) Of course, we decided to go ahead with comments as does corporate blogs like Dell and Yahoo!, two of my favorite corporate blogs run by two of my favorite corp. bloggers – Lionel Menchaca and Nicki Dugan.

2. BNET Podcast with Carmine Gallo

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to upload the mp3 file to WordPress and nor was I able to pull the HTML code from BNET’s site, I’ve asked Carmine Gallo (who interviewed me) for the mp3 file. Will embed it as soon as I can. But in the meanwhile, feel free to check out the podcast on their site.
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In case you didn’t catch this earlier here’s an interview I did w/ Natali Del Conte before she moved to CNET New York.

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How about ubiquity of CEO blogging? I don’t think so. I have said this before and I don’t mind repeating myself. I don’t see the era of CEO blogging happening, but I’d agree with the ubiquity of corporate blogging for obvious reasons, I’ll enumerate below.

And he predicted, in effect, that the rest of the executive world will catch up. “Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it,” he said in an on-stage interview with O’Reily Media chief Tim O’Reilly.

As Godin stated earlier, here’s the problem with that assumption

Here’s the problem. Blogs work when they are based on: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness and Controversy (maybe Utility if you want six). Does this sound like a CEO to you? [Source: Seth Godin]

However, I agree with Schwartz when he suggests that there is a need for executives and leaders to communicate

And, since not all CEOs are in the mold of a blogger (like Schwartz), the right question here is what are the easiest ways for CEOs to communicate effectively with their audience, given their disposition.

What may work for time-strapped CEOs?

1. Twitter.

CEOs can use twitter as a great online customer focus group where they can listen to users talking about your product/service. It’s as easy as steps 1-2-3 (just track your company name on twitter via a tool like tweetscan) and be a fly on the online wall.

However, I did collect all the questions after the fact, and forward them on to Jonathan to answer by email. The questions and Jonathan’s answers are below. I’ve presented it as if it were a twitter interview, snarfing up the questions from tweetscan, and then getting Jonathan’s twitter image from his own feed.

2. Corporate Blogs

Speaking of responding to user questions, despite my apprehension about CEOs wrestling with the challenges of a full-time blogging, I think it’s important that CEOs connect with the user community at every given opportunity. At LinkedIn, we’ve had our CEO Dan Nye respond to user questions on the NYT blog in the past.

And more interestingly, members of a company’s executive team can also be contributing bloggers (depending on how much time they’ve to spare). For e.g. how about a series from your CEO or maybe your VP of product around major product announcements. You can actually create a separate feed for these contributing posts if your audience so demands.

3. Professional networks.

Given my current day-job at LinkedIn, I’ve a close view of how you could use a professional networking site like LinkedIn for effective communication both within the company (via LinkedIn News) as well as external Q&A sessions with users of your product (via LinkedIn Answers).

Are there any other ways you see CEOs communicate effectively. Feel free to leave a comment, or two…

—If you’re into corporate blogging, you may find these earlier posts of mine, interesting as well.

Proof of old politics wolf in new politics sheep’s clothing: they assume the ways of the new social web revolution as a means to come into contact with us, but when they lose (and maybe when they win, as well?) they drop the pretense of involvement, and go back to whatever they really believe in. Which is clearly not this new emerging whatever-the-hell-it-is on the web.

But then Stowe Boyd continue along the same vein asking the all-important question:

Will the winner of the race continue to use social media after installed behind in the White House?

And, let’s be candid here – it is gonna be challenging for presidential candidates to literally be present at all times on every other social media channel that sprouts each passing day, given his/her priorities of running a country. Having said that, I believe every political entity (senator or president) absolutely need an authentic representative or community evangelist/s in the social media universe. Why?

1. Analogy to community evangelists in the corporate space

As I’ve maintained in my earlier posts, it is not realistic to expect CEOs to maintain a blog. Having said that I know how important it is for a company to have a legitimate representative who’s a point-of-contact at various social media touch points. For e.g. As far as LinkedIn is concerned, you can reach me either on LinkedIn (d’uh), Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, my blog, the LinkedIn blog, etc… but I don’t know whom I should contact if I’d like to offer support or feedback to any of the three current political campaigns (feel free to leave a comment if you know who that individuals are). And, I’m not talking about the “social media accounts” that currently exist with faceless interns posting vapid commentary/schedule updates. (If you know of leaders actually updating these pages, leave a comment)

2. Why does it help having a real person represent a political brand

The same reasons it helps a company have a community evangelist. Two main reasons. 1. It humanizes the political brand – it helps having a turn-to person when you’d like to offer feedback 2. Crisis Management. Like in Edwards case, given all the brouhaha over his absence these days, it’d be nice to have someone from their campaign (it could be an intern) who actually responds authentically to social media mentions (like to Stowe Boyd or Craig Stoltz).

3. Why is it important?

This will happen, in much the same way social media has become a commoditized feature of many Fortune 500 companies’ marketing plans but more importantly because in politics more than in corporate America there’s a great need to sustain that human connectivity with the citizenry. The voting populace deserves both a response and conversation with their leaders and since a leader may get weighed down with the urgencies of a fast changing world, a social media savvy political evangelist/community evangelist/s who can do that for them are an absolute necessity.

What are your thoughts? Are there evangelists for the current three campaigns (Obama/Clinton/McCain) I’m not aware of?

a. customer service is a totally different beast from community evangelism and I wouldn’t like to confuse the two

b. there were a few inaccuracies in the list, like having my friend AI (developer evangelist) in that list of community managers. I’ll remedy that in the next version of the list of community managers.

So, what can we do about it?

What if we created a database of community managers on social media sites like twitter? Maybe we create a collaborative spreadsheet (Google Docs) listing out community managers from different companies. Feel free to leave comments if that’d be something that you’d like to contribute towards.

How can I monitor my brand?

As a community manager or just as somebody who’s interested in the company you work for, if you’d like to monitor conversations around your company brand, the Read/Write Web article had outlined a Yahoo! Pipes solution, which I find rather complicated. For something that’s (a) dead simple and (b) brings relevant articles (searched by keywords) right to your Email Inbox, I now turn to Google Alerts.

What’s different since I last saw it is the fact that you can now monitor by Blogs, Web, Videos and Groups. Or, receive a comprehensive digest either (a) as it happens, (b) once a day or (c) once a week.

I also do monitor tweets on Twitter via TweetScan, whose RSS feed of results I then re-route to my Google Reader.

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“It’s a good idea to have a chief blogger,” said Mack Collier, a social-media consultant and blogger at the Viral Garden, citing Dell’s Lionel Menchaca and LinkedIn’s Mario Sundar as examples of a single personality positively affecting a brand.

However, let me clarify that my official job title at LinkedIn is community evangelist (social media is an important part of it) and I’ll get into what exactly that role entails at least as far as LinkedIn is concerned.

Here are a few questions that are probably on top-of-mind for you, so let’s get those resolved.

1. What does a community evangelist or a social media evangelist do?

Let me clarify that in LinkedIn’s case, I’m the community evangelist who dabbles in all things social media. What kind of social media doesn’t really matter. What really matters is that as community evangelist my goal is to “Help users understand LinkedIn better and help LinkedIn understand its users better” (Check out my LinkedIn profile).

2. Does a company need a chief blogger?

This is a question that David Armano, another good friend (who blogs here) posed to his twitter audience and he happened to get two kinds of answers (1. Yes, 2. No).

As I mentioned at the SXSW panel session. As a company, first ask yourself,

* Why am I doing this? What am I trying to achieve?

* Where is my audience currently?

* If they’re online, how social media savvy are they?

Now, if the answers to the above three questions are (a) connect with my users, (b) online, (c) highly social media or web savvy, then it makes sense to find the different online tools to connect with that audience effectively. Social media tools like blogs, twitter, friendfeed and it may be some other service tomorrow, should all allow you to do that.

From my personal experience, here are the channels I use as community evangelist to communicate with anyone interested in talking to me about professional networking, social networking or LinkedIn:

Now, if your answer to all three of the above questions has led you to the fact that you indeed need a corporate blogger I’d say the primary goal of that individual would be to help “initiate, sustain and/or expand the conversation” between your internal teams and your users. As Hugh Macleod, succinctly outlined in his “Porous Membrane” meme:

“The more porous your membrane (“x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform and align with the external conversation, and vice versa.“

For e.g. at LinkedIn, I’ve made it a point to evangelize blogging and it’s benefits to everyone working within LinkedIn. As of today, we’ve had 35 colleagues of mine contributing to the blog from within LinkedIn. That’s a whopping 15% of our workforce (and changing as we keep hiring more), blogging about products, tips-and-trips, feature enhancements etc… directly to the user and responding to user comments. We’ve also had key members of our management team blog as well. The key here is to inspire the culture within an organization to converse with users. Not all companies get it right, but those that do are doing their users and themselves a great favor.

So, per my experience, here are three things a chief blogger/corporate blogger should do well:

1. Internal Evangelism: It’s not about just the corporate blogger blogging. A corporate blogger is all about getting the folks behind the products/services to talk about it to the users of those features. Build that culture. I know Lionel practices that at Dell and so do we at LinkedIn.

2. Listen and Respond: Another key area is listening to comments and responding wherever appropriate. Now given that blogs afford a quick response mechanism, I try to go through the comments stream and then I’ll inform the appropriate contributing blogger who then responds to comments. I always keep in mind, how time-swamped everyone is (engineering, product, design, etc…) and schedule accordingly.

3. Do something about it: I maintain a spreadsheet with user comments from the blogosphere, categorized by product feature, tonality, status and more. Getting this feedback to the team is critical and when it results in a feature, we then point it out on the blog as well.
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That’ll be my $0.03c for the day! Feel free to comment on some situations you’re going through as a company related to social media/corporate blogging and I’ll give you my take in the comments section.

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So, I was about to beat my insomnia by falling asleep when I (for some reason) decide to go over my Google Reader and look what I find, a blog post I had to blog about. Sean Moffit over at Buzz Canuck, draws attention to an IBM research item that analyzes why users flock to social networking sites? (Read his blog post here)

It’s interesting that 9% of individuals seem to be on social networking/media sites for a certain brand kinship. Now, couple that with my most recent post where I drew attention to the fact that social media sites like twitter affords a great opportunity to connect with folks working at these companies (Read how Dell, LinkedIn and Comcast encountered users on social media sites), and we may be onto something.

Community Managers and their Twitterid’s

Sean used LinkedIn (yay!) to gather a list of 25 community focused individuals from companies ranging from Apple to Microsoft. And so, taking a cue from Sean’s post, I’ve culled the twitter ids of the community managers he outlines on the post (or at least the ones I could find). Since, these are the individuals expressly tasked with maintaining that “conversation” with users, feel free to follow us.

Interestingly, I couldn’t find the twitter ids of the majority of the community folks on the list. hmm… Any other community managers missing from this list, please leave a comment. And, if you know the twitter ids of some of the above-mentioned individuals, feel free to suggest that as well on the comments section. Stay tuned for more.